I devoured this new book on Internet search and the history of Google by John Battelle. I think this is a very important book as it lays out what has now become a basic mode of living with the web. Search is the driver of the commercial internet. It is the main means by which we navigate, recover, and discover information. Search underlies aggregation, which I believe is the most important new means of learning for knowledge workers. Search is at the heart of social networking.

Battelle's book tells the very interesting story of how Google came to be Google. Battelle looks at Yahoo and examines how Yahoo's approach to search differs from Googles (primarily in the involvement of human editors). Yahoo has a search shortcut that tries to steer searchers to the most salient results. The last chapter, “Perfect Search,” is worth the price of the book if only for Battelle's peak into the future. Search will be everywhere. Search will be local and personal. Search will be the new interface for navigating the digital universe. Search is key to the “semantic web,” which is the web tagged with metadata. Search and blogs are intimately connected because of the linking properties of blogs:

“Together with the ecosystems of links, both inbound and outbound, which grow around a specific site, the blog becomes a very nuanced (and eminently indexable) statement of individual's social standing, relationships, interests, and history.” (page 267.)

Blogs can become a “proxy for thousands and thousands of professional taxonomists.”

Battelle predicts that search will become “federated and domain specific.” He references GlobSpec, an engineering specific search engine, as the best example of search. It is used by a million engineers to find and spec parts. GlobalSpec's editors identified “100,000 very specific sites they believed contained information related to the domain of engineering.”

I see very focused search coming in the near future through a combination of blog networks, aggregation “reading lists” and learning directors acting as human editors for searchable sets of information. These sets may be very narrow (only relevant to a particular group for a short period of time). At the same time they may be very valuable to this group.

Read this book.

Share This

This entry was posted on Monday, December 12th, 2005 at 1:52 pm and is filed under Main Page. You can subscribe via RSS 2.0 feed to this post's comments. You can comment below, or link to this permanent URL from your own site. Your comments will be moderated but will appear as soon as humanly possible.